The Hunterdon Art Museum announces a panel discussion with five artists whose work is included in A Legacy of Making: 29 Contemporary Artists Inspired by Their Italian Heritage, a major exhibition at the museum.
The discussion will take place on Saturday, December 5, from 1:00-3:00 p.m. The public is invited. The event is free with paid entry to the museum.
The great wave of Italian immigration took place in the closing years of the 19th century and into the middle of the 20th. Most of the arrivals were Southern Italians who set foot on Ellis Island with few belongings but rich with the ingenuity, creativity, and will to make a new life. This tradition of creativity and handwork continues with their children and grandchildren.
Painters and sculptors, photographers and textile artists, they synthesize Italian or immigrant culture with their experience as trained artists working in a contemporary art world. Gianluca Bianchino, Milisa Galazzi, Diana González Gandolfi, Thomas Micchelli, and Patricia Miranda will talk about the Italian immigrant experience on their life and art. Curator Joanne Mattera will moderate.
Gianluca Bianchino was born in Avellino, leaving with his family after the earthquake there in 1980. Now living in New Jersey, but returning frequently to his Italian hometown, he makes map-like paintings and sculptures that reference, he says, “the interrelatedness of geography, geology, and geopolitics.”
Milisa Galazzi, living and working in Rhode Island, is the granddaughter of immigrants. Her paternal grandmother told her that “good girls should always be sewing.” Although she rebelled against that gendered textile tradition as a girl, she now makes art that incorporates embroidery and lace.
Diana González Gandolfi was born in Buenos Aires to a family that maintained many of the customs brought over by her bisnonno, Gaetano Gandolfi, who had fought with Garibaldi in Italy’s War of Independence. As a girl she relocated with her parents to New Jersey and now lives and works in Philadelphia.
Thomas Micchelli is the grandson of a family that lived near Pompeii before emigrating to Newark. He says his childhood was more Italian than American and that when he went to Italy for the first time, he was “struck by the uncanny sensation of returning to a home I never knew”
Patricia Miranda has widespread roots—the paternal side from Alto Adige in the North, the maternal from Southern Italy. You may find the artist’s words familiar: “The immigrant experience for us, the descendants, holds commonalities shared by many. The homeland is a complex mix of familiarity and strangeness, of longing and connection, and of loss.”